Afraid to tell people what books their developers are really reading?
On the O'Reilly editors list, Mark Brokering writes: "Check out this bookshelf in the Microsoft ad that just ran in PC Magazine". (Popup image.)
Interesting indeed. The ad, with the caption, "Find tools and guidance to defend your network at microsoft.com/security/IT" features a developer at his desk. On the desk is a shelf full of books. Leaving aside the fact that most of them aren't security books, what caught our attention was that the three books on the end were O'Reilly books, with the cover of the book visible on the end photoshopped to take the animal off the cover and to modify the title on the spine.
The three O'Reilly books on the developer's bookshelf were Building Internet Firewalls by Elizabeth Zwicky, Simon Cooper, and Brent Chapman, Jon Udell's visionary (and before its time) book Practical Internet Groupware, and a defaced copy of Ken Lunde's bible on Asian multi-byte character sets, CJKV Information Processing. The blowfish is wiped off the cover -- maybe the ad agency had a bad experience with sushi -- and the title changed to CJKK Information Processing. Fortunately, anyone in the computer industry will still recognize them as O'Reilly books, and perhaps have a small smile at Microsoft's expense.
Hey, it's a multi-platform world!
P.S. It's in the latest issue of PC Magazine (the one with Desperate Housewives on the cover), page 48-49.
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Comments: 6
As the author of "CJKV Information Processing," I found the Microsoft ad amusing. A co-worker gave me a magazine with this two-page ad a couple weeks ago, and I have added it to my scrapbook.
Dave -- I was just having a laugh at it. It's taught in branding 101 never to mention your competitor's product, so I'm sure that Microsoft Press (part of Microsoft Learning) wouldn't have been too thrilled to see O'Reilly books so clearly front and center in their ad.
But my guess is that this happened at the agency level, and not at Microsoft.
Cluetrain marketing 101, however, would say that featuring your competitor's product, where it's really complementary, would get you clue points. Kind of like the famous Macy's vs. Gimbel's scene in the original Miracle on 34th Street.
But people are all over the map on this. And it does happen more often than you might think. One of my favorites was the cover of a Wrox book, back when they featured pictures of the author. The author was wearing an O'Reilly t-shirt. That's either clueless, or completely clueful and "in your face" depending on the amount of self-knowledge involved :-)
In this particular case, I would have thought they'd either want to leave the books in there, or photoshop them out entirely. Modifying them just brings attention to it.
That's hilarious. I know a lot of people working in IT who wish they could take more pictures of "hot girl in tropical setting" (or even just "girl" for that matter), but finding both a model and a setting for "nerd with computer and books in cube" really could not be any simpler of a task. I guess they were bound to that stock photo for some reason we will never know.
Microsoft should fire whatever agency produced that ad. It has got to be one of the worst-looking pieces of garbage I've ever seen. Insipid, uninspired, no concept, crappy production...
Microsoft=Boring. Beige. Shoot me, please!
"Get a life. Buy a Mac."
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Adam Kalsey [01.27.06 02:13 PM]
The cover of the book still says CJKV; only the spine was changed to read CJKK.